Archive for the ‘WebSphere’ Category

With the recent push to meet IBM’s requirements for business partner certifications, we have been working through the process of getting the required sales/technical certifications in a few areas that we were missing them. We certainly did not have all the sales certifications, and Xtivia has been working on getting them locked up. We already had the M197 IBM WebSphere Portal Family Sales Mastery and Related Lotus Products certification, but given that it was in my area of expertise, and I was curious what a sales certification test looked like, I took the test myself last week. And it lived up to my expectation – EASY, and I knocked it out in 33 minutes out of the available 90 minutes.

Today, I was asked by my boss if I could take the M159 WebSphere Sales Mastery Test for the Sales Professional v3 certification test as we needed it. Based on my earlier experience with M197, I fully expected this one to be a trivial task. Read the rest of this entry »

I am really excited about this new offering from our business unit – the official press release went out today and I could not resist blogging about it even though I am getting a bit salesy here! As Dennis said in the press release – we have been providing remote WebSphere administration and development services for various client installations that included WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment, WebSphere Portal, and IBM Web Content Management. These services ranged from complete outsourcing of all WebSphere administration and maintenance needs, to on-demand consulting and mentoring. So, in essence, we have now codified these services that we have been offering for years, into pre-packaged offerings that make it simpler for prospects and customers to understand the value proposition of Xtivia’s remote WebSphere services.

An excerpt from the news release –

Virtual-WebSphereAdmin provides a cost-effective solution for organizations seeking to optimize the availability and performance of their critical WebSphere-based business information systems. This is accomplished through a comprehensive remote WebSphere Administration service designed specifically to meet the WebSphere administration, maintenance, management and consulting needs of our clients. Xtivia’s Virtual-WebSphereAdmin service combines a sophisticated suite of monitoring and reporting tools with expert consulting services to deliver complete WebSphere performance management.

We recently switched one of our client’s WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Portal based infrastructure to a new physical environment. During our testing we found that we were getting stale connection exceptions in SystemOut.log and in the application logs. On digging a little deeper, our team tracked it down to the fact that the Cisco firewall was dropping our Oracle database connections after they had been inactive for a certain amount of time. When our team discussed the issue with the network team, they were essentially told that all was good with the network infrastructure. The application team tweaked some of the connection pool settings but that only helped alleviate the issue slightly and we started encountering performance issues. Eventually, we figured out a solution that works!

I needed to implement Single Sign-On between IBM WebSphere Portal and HP Operations Dashboard (HPOD) without using a SSO product, and figured that we could do that using the LTPA token generated by WPE on login to the Portal. For LTPA token based SSO to work, we need to be able to decode the LTPA token on the HPOD front – HPOD is based on Jetspeed – in other words, we are looking at implementing SSO between WebSphere and Jetspeed. I was just getting ready to look up some info that I have from Jerry Cuomo on the LTPA token format, when I tried a quick Google search and found an even better answer. I stumbled upon a blog entry and functional code for LTPA token decoding at http://offbytwo.com/2007/08/21/working-with-ltpa.html. I downloaded the code, exported the LTPA keys from a test WPE server, copied the 3DESKey and our LTPA encryption password into LtpaUtils, logged in to the WPE test server, determined the LTPA token cookie value for test purposes, and was able to decrypt it just fine using LtpaUtils. And thanks to Cosmin, all of this took about 20 minutes!

Today one of the portal administrators in my team was trying to reconfigure the LDAP server being used by an existing WebSphere Portal v6 install. The specific reconfiguration that he was doing was extremely simple – he was replacing one LDAP server with another identically configured LDAP server – so the only change was the name of the LDAP server. We were able to perform this change without disabling/re-enabling security in WebSphere Portal. Read the rest of this entry »